the ceramic processing chain
How does loose powder become a solid teacup or a turbine part? Along a chain of steps, each handing the part to the next. In rough order: make and prepare the powder, mix it into a workable form (a paste, slurry, or granulate), shape it into the desired form ('forming'), dry it and burn out any binders, fire (sinter) it into a dense ceramic, and finish it (grind, polish, inspect). This preview is the roadmap for most of this whole subject.
The part passes through three named states. First the powder, fine particles, ideally pure, uniform, and free-flowing. Forming turns powder into a green body: a shaped but fragile, un-fired part held together weakly (by pressing, slip casting, extrusion, tape casting, injection moulding, or printing). Drying and binder burnout gently remove liquid and organic additives without cracking it. Then firing (sintering) welds the particles and shrinks the pores, giving the dense fired part, now hard, strong, and permanent, but shrunk by 15 to 20 percent with its final microstructure locked in. Machining is done last if at all, because fired ceramics are hard and brittle and expensive to cut.
The chain has an unforgiving logic: every flaw introduced early survives to the end and often gets worse. A clump in the powder, a density gradient from uneven pressing, a bubble from casting, a crack from too-fast drying, each becomes a strength-limiting flaw in the fired part, because ceramics are flaw-controlled and cannot heal defects by flowing. So ceramic processing is really the art of not creating flaws, stage by stage. The rest of the subject walks this chain link by link; keep the whole chain in view so each step's job is clear.
A slip-cast sink starts as alumina or clay powder stirred into a watery slip, poured into a plaster mould that sucks out water to leave a green shell, which is dried, then fired, shrinking and hardening into the glazed basin. Powder to green body to fired part, the same chain for a sink or a spark plug.
Powder, forming, green body, drying and burnout, firing, finished part; flaws made early survive to the end.
The chain is not strictly linear or universal, glass is melted and formed directly, and cement hardens by reacting with water, but for the powder-and-fire ceramics it is the master roadmap, and its rule is that early flaws are permanent.